It doesn’t matter who we are, every one of us has a motive for staying long-term in Beijing, and it tends to fall into one of two categories; for career or for love. If you have the best of one of them already, then you count your blessings, but is it really possible to have both the great career and the great relationship?

It seems that a lot of the time we are faced with choosing between the two. Whether it’s turning down a career move to suit your relationship, or ending a relationship to concentrate on your career. As some of Beijing’s billionaires had come to realize, despite having made their career a success, they found that they had been left way behind in the love department, and turned to a Shanghai based match-making company. The company’s recent super duper ‘singles’ ball at a whopping 100,000 Yuan per head goes to show just how having both the relationship and the career really means “hitting the jackpot” to most people.

Despite our inability to actually count the number of couples we know who really do ‘have it all’, it’s not entirely ‘pie in the sky’ for every one of us to achieve it. For starters, it’s helpful to be with someone who’s in the same phase of life as yourself, for example, there’s no point in dating a student if you’re a high-flying lawyer - the lawyer might have 5 minutes free, whereas the student has 5 days free, giving the student more time to feel lonely and neglected.
Being in the same kind of career as your partner can be helpful in allowing them to understand your level of commitment, and eliminates those terrible “why is it so important to you?” arguments. However, having too much in common can also feel like your relationship is an extension of your career, which may not give you the variety of life you need.

As with most great things, finding the love of your life as well as having a job that fulfills you, is not just going to fall into your lap. It takes some time to realize what you’re most comfortable in doing, and it takes the right time for you to be willing to commit to both whole-heartedly.

For women, however, finding a balance between their career and a relationship can be a much more pressing issue. As their biological clock begins to tick louder with each passing month, being able to sustain a serious relationship without neglecting work commitments can seem like a task for Superman - but then even he couldn’t manage to be in two places at the same time. I mean, is there really enough hours in a day to have both?

In the times that we live in, it’s often expected for the woman to have her own career and her own money. Many men, also now including the traditional type, are unwilling to date a woman who needs to be entirely dependent on her spouse, which adds a tad more weight onto the shoulders of the women trying to balance it all. And it’s all too obvious to us that if we slow down our career to concentrate on our family life, i.e. have babies, we run the risk of never catching up again.

So we are then told that we can have our career first, and wait to have the babies later in life. But how many women actually want to risk waiting and possibly finding that they can’t, and they’ve unknowingly made the ultimate sacrifice for their careers. On top of all that we hear that at the age of 27 our chances of conceiving begin to fall rapidly, and then we have a full-scale emotional breakdown on our hands.

Being the winner in this case, and beating the odds so that we can have both the career and the family life, often falls in the hands of finding the right partner. And, as we are told time and time again, the best relationships are based on honesty. If you feel that you are now in the right place to start a family or concentrate on your career, it’s not something that you should be holding off and waiting for your partner to decide – it should be a mutual agreement, and not something that you are afraid to bring up in conversation. Discussing this kind of topic is something that is expected when two people are serious about their relationship with each other.

Therefore, I have narrowed things down to two points. Albeit two very important ones that can mean the difference between having both the relationship and the dream job you long for, or having the life that just wasn’t meant for you. Read and respond accordingly!

1. BE HONEST Be honest with your partner from the start and let them know your future goals. Wasting people’s time is so 2009; this is 2010 and we want to know the truth. You tell us what you want, we decide whether we want the same, and that’s it. It may seem like a business deal, but if you don’t do it now, you’ll be regretting it when two years down the line you find that you’re both not only on different pages, but from entirely different books. If your plans conflict in too many ways, decide whether you are willing to compromise those goals, or go your separate ways.
   
   

2. SHARE Your career and your love life are both massive chunks of your life, and it can be hard to switch from the ‘day job’ to concentrate on the ‘&^% job’. However, in the spirit of having a trusting and honest relationship, why not *share your thoughts and concerns about your job with your partner? They may not be able to physically help, but talking about it with them will help you think more clearly, and their outside perspective may offer fresh insight on the issue.
   As the saying goes, ‘the more time you invest in someone, the more you value them’. The key to a healthy and balanced relationship is finding someone who is not only equally committed to their own career, but is also willing to discuss your work issues as well as their own. This way, you learn and you grow together.
   
   

Nikki Aaron